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sources close to Apple who say that Apple is on track to introduce Macs running Apple-made CPUs and GPUs in 2021. The chips the company is developing are codenamed Kalamata.

The fact that Apple is developing multiple Mac chips may be a clue that Apple may not just be thinking about a single new Mac laptop based on in-house silicon but an entire line. It’s not clear from this whether these will be additive to the current, Intel-based lineup or whether Apple will began replacing Macs in its current lineup with computers built with these chips in mind.

While this would be a scary transition for those deeply familiar with with the Mac platform, especially developers, I am very excited by the idea of Apple managing their own chips with their state of the art chip design.

The speed of the the iPhone is much faster than the fastest Mac in their lineup for single core performance. Yes, the $1,000 iPhone 11 Pro is faster than the $50,000 Mac Pro.

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light … and then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re gonna test that,” Trump said, addressing Bryan. “And then I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”

A thought that I have continued to come across with all of the news and confusion of the day, the lives lost; what was their story? You are the only one who can speak to your emotions. Only you can describe how something makes you feel. This is the human experience.

It’s sort of a morbid thing, but what happens to your legacy, your story, when you die? If you aren’t there to shape it, others will do it for you, so it is important to have a role in how your story unfolds from your point of view.

I am guilty of not taking the time to post, reach out to friends, comment, and just be present. So here is the challenge I am presenting myself. My Quarantine makeover. I am going to try to post on my blog at least 3 times a week. This is my space. I should use it.

Erika, our foster dog, Foxxy, and myself. Walking at the lake.

I hate posting pictures of myself, but I am going to try to do more of that too. I think in 10 years I will be glad I did.

I have been following this story for some days now, and I can’t figure out why US companies and brands are standing up for freedom of speech. The worst offender in this, in my opinion, is Apple, the so-called champion of privacy and human rights in the tech industry.

From Ars Technica:

“The app has been used to target and ambush police” in Hong Kong, Apple claims.

Today I wrote to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, to tell him his company’s decision to remove HKmap live app from Appstore will cause problems for normal Hong Kong’s citizens trying to avoid police presence while they are under constant fear ofpolice brutality. Values over profits, pls!

I understand that no decision is easy. That there are many consequences to decisions from either angle. I also understand that this does not comport with Apple’s marketing and until now, what I thought to be a core philosophy.

From Nick Start writing for The Verge:

Apple capitulating to the Chinese government is nothing new. The company’s deep business interests in China, which include a majority of its consumer electronics supply chain, mean that in almost all cases, it abides by the country’s censorship policies and its sensitive reactions to any and all criticism of the Chinese government.

Apple must be scrambling for time. I can’t imagine they would want to continue to rely on Chinese manufacturers to assemble iPhones and other devices for them. While it is certain that this isn’t a decision one can do overnight, even with the power a company like Apple has, it also must be done in as little time as possible.

The article is supposed to be about the 50 states PR move around the, then new, artist Sufjan Stevens. It is about that, but this is the piece that kills me:

The tipping point came in late July. Pitchfork, the increasingly influential arbiter of indie (full disclosure: I am a contributor there), had given the album a lukewarm review—“a 7.5,” Gill claims, “and it wasn’t Best New Music.” Except the site’s top editor, Ryan Schreiber, had not actually heard it. “We were bugging him to actually listen to it. And then he listened to it and he freaked out and he was like, ‘I can’t believe we gave this album a 7.5,’” Gill says.

Pitchfork is such a waste of space. They were/are so influential, yet clearly are fine with making up scores and standing behind articles written about albums that hadn’t listened to.

I find this disgusting. Yes, the brand violated Wikipedia’s Terms of Use, but more importantly, they promoted a company by violating the integrity of one of the few remaining ideals of the Internet.

The brand and agency took pictures of athletes wearing the brand while trekking to famous locations around the world, including Brazil’s Guarita State Park and Farol do Mampimptuba, Cuillin in Scotland and Peru’s Huayna Picchu. They then updated the Wikipedia images in the articles for those locations so that now, the brand would appear in the top of Google image search results when consumers researched any of those locations

Amazing account of hiking through Chernobyl. Some of the details they recount are incredible, for instance, the levels of radiation at the same building being drastically different based on assumed conditions at the time of the explosion.

Exhausted, we picked an apartment building at random and went in. Our initial thought was to camp on the roof, but the radiation on the roof’s surface was over 50 μSv/hr, so we moved to apartment #23 instead. The radiation there was only 0.08 μSv/hr (actually lower than our apartment in California). The former occupants must have had their windows closed when the explosion occurred. We collapsed and slept for most of the day.

One-ring calls may appear to be from phone numbers somewhere in the United States, including three initial digits that resemble U.S. area codes. But savvy scammers often use international numbers from regions that also begin with three-digit codes – for example, “649” goes to the Turks and Caicos and “809” goes to the Dominican Republic.

If you call any such number, you risk being connected to a phone number outside the U.S. As a result, you may wind up being charged a fee for connecting, along with significant per-minute fees for as long as they can keep you on the phone. These charges may show up on your bill as premium services.

The current administration is fine with this being the best you hear about one-ring scams. In fact, I’m surprised the FCC (which still has many people who do good work, and want to help people, but have been hampered from doing so) has released this much information on the scam and how to avoid it.

Long story short – in this age of VOIP services and cell phones, if you don’t recognize a number, don’t answer it. If they don’t leave a voicemail, don’t call them back. If you do, you may want to disable international calling on your service.

As long as phone service providers make money, they have little incentive stop these scams without government intervention and regulation.